


Whistle While You Work

by alexjanna91



Series: Witch Bucky [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Gen, Humor, Magic, Medical Inaccuracies, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Bucky Barnes, References to Drugs, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-18 15:03:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17583083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexjanna91/pseuds/alexjanna91
Summary: Now that it was obvious Bucky hadn't killed himself warding the entire Avengers Tower, it was about time he got to work on the two most difficult and in need members of Steve's team. He was going to need to really think outside the box if he wanted to help Bruce Banner and Tony Stark.





	1. Thank You for Smoking

**Author's Note:**

> Direct sequel to [Let's Get Down to Business](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17528030/chapters/41296637).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky was used to weaving magic with unusual objects, but this is pretty unusual even for him. Then again Banner and the Hulk had an unusual problem.

“Remind me again why you felt the need to steal my crochet hooks and my good wool yarn.”

The corner of Bucky’s lips twitched and he rolled his eyes at his sister. “I didn’t steal them. I’m borrowing them.”

Rebecca raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him. “Right. That’s why I come back from bingo to find you’ve broken into my apartment again and making a mess of my crafts box.”

“It’s not a mess!” he protested. “It’s perfectly organized.”

“Barely controlled chaos is what you mean.” Rebecca sipped at her tea and came around behind the rocking chair Bucky was sitting in to peer over his shoulder. 

Nimble flesh and metal fingers glided and looped and pulled the thin strands of yarn into an intricate pattern. Over and over again in one long chord, Bucky’s hands moved through the motions with smooth practiced ease, as if his skills hadn’t had a chance to atrophy over the last seventy years. 

“Hmm, yellow and violet. For clear thinking and reflection?” she asked, watching her brother work his magic, almost entranced. He’d always been better at this type of magic than her. She could guess, from the other materials he had scattered around her living room that he was making enchanted jewelry. Detailed work. Intricate, delicate, and finicky. For such a big guy it had always amazed her how Bucky could create such beautiful, elegant pieces of magic. 

“Violet for spirituality and self-awareness as well,” Bucky added, not bothered by his sister watching him work. He remembered she used to love watching him and he used to love the time spent together. 

Violet was also, in the combination of elements he was weaving together, representative of a sensitive, compassionate, intuitive soul; as well as an introvert. When he thought of Bruce Banner and all he knew and learned about the man, this fit him perfectly. 

“There’s something about the blue,” Rebecca murmured, squinting at the yarn trying to sift through the feelings she was sensing in the magic. Trust, calm, peace, but also…

“Suppression of appetite.” 

A shiver went up her spine, Bucky’s words revealing exactly what she’d been trying to interpret. Suppression of appetite. An appetite for violence and destruction. 

“That is a very unusual invocation,” she said. 

“This is a very unusual circumstance,” Bucky replied wryly. 

Rebecca would say so, weaving a spell for the Hulk was bound to be all kinds of unusual. 

They were quiet for a time after that. Bucky using his sister’s crochet needles with deft movements and Rebecca amusing herself with trying to parse out where exactly her brother was going with his spell. 

Brown (honesty, stability, building a solid foundation) and black (control of power, acknowledgment of a barrier) were intertwined with the other three colors in a combination that should have been ugly. Instead, Rebecca thought it was soothing to look at, beautiful in its own way. 

Tapping her weathered but loved wedding band against her bright yellow mug, she watched Bucky loop, swoop, and pull the colorful array into a long cord of repeating Romanian transformation knots. The thing was an interesting combination of Romanian practicality and Native American whimsy. If anyone else had tried this, she was sure it would have blown up in their face, probably literally, but for Bucky it worked. It shouldn’t work, but somehow he saw the way and made the impossible possible. 

Their ma had always said there was something special about Bucky and the way he worked his magic. The way he was able to combine, marry, and intertwine supposedly incompatible magic from completely different cultures to create something functional, harmonious, even beautiful.

Even as a young man barely finished with training, Rebecca knew her brother was probably the most powerful witch, magically and in ingenuity, she was ever likely to meet. 

Bucky tied a sturdy oak button carved with the Native American symbol for soul on one end of the finished cord and knotted the other end into a loop. 

He set it aside and picked up the next element to his spell. 

“Now the cord I get,” Rebecca commented, her voice amused, “but you’re going to have to explain the cigarette lighter to me.” 

Bucky snorted and glanced over his shoulder at her. “What? You mean you can’t tell just by lookin’?”

Rebecca flicked his ear in retaliation and eyed the weathered car cigarette lighter doubtfully. The little symbol of a smoking cigarette on the black plastic knob was half worn away and the metal along the tube was dotted with tarnish spots and hints of rust. It looked at least thirty years old and a hard lived thirty at that. 

“Let me guess,” she drawled ignoring his pout as he rubbed his stinging ear, “You scrounged that out of an ’80s Oldsmobile didn’t you?”

“An ’86 Supra, actually,” he replied with a mulish sniff. 

“We had one of those,” Rebecca offered lightly. “Sexy car. Tried to take it camping once. The kids had to sit on top of the suitcases in the backseat ’cause the trunk was the size of a matchbox.”

Bucky chuckled and refocused on his task. Picking up the metallic silver fine point permanent marker he pulled the cap with his teeth and started tracing a tiny ring of mixed Romanian and Native American runes around the short metal tube. The Romanian runes represented harmony, duality, and acceptance. Only one Native American symbol was part of the pattern; the symbol for a whole self, made so by body, mind, and soul.

Mumbling around the cap held in his teeth, Bucky explained why exactly a 1980s car cigarette lighter was essential to Bruce and Hulk’s charm. 

“It calls upon heat and fire, passion, and Hulk is an explosively passionate being. The nickel in the nichrome heating coil will help drain away Bruce’s depression, his fear and anger. And the iron in it will nurture the Will to Live inside him.”

Rebecca made an agreeing sound, able to follow along with her brother’s logic, though she had to ask, “But why an ’86 Supra?”

Bucky couldn’t help the smile that curved crookedly around the pen cap as he thought about what had called him to that particular car. 

“Its first owners had twins. Boy-girl twins. Born from the same womb, of the same love. Bonded by blood and love and companionship. And yet two very different, very individual souls.”

“Ah.” The missing piece of the puzzle, Rebecca thought as she watched Bucky’s steady hand guiding the marker’s tip with elegant strokes. Twins were special. Held their own kind of magic by just being what they were. Boy-girl fraternal twins being the rarest of all were therefore just a little bit _more_.

The duality of their nature fit perfectly into the spell Bucky was weaving. 

Rebecca watched the rest of her brother’s work in silence basking in the familiarity of the moment and the comfort of feeling Bucky’s magic flowing gently around them. 

Fifteen minutes later, Bucky was finally done. He held up the finished product for Rebecca to see. 

The colorful cord was woven tight and seamless, the wooden button fit in the corresponding loop nicely. The cigarette lighter, covered with rings and rings of delicate silver runes, was hanging from the chord by sturdy wire wrapped securely around its black knob. 

The necklace positively vibrated with the complex interwoven magic of two different peoples. Rebecca sucked in a sharp breath as she studied the spell closely trying to pick out all the incompatible and conflicting elements Bucky would have had to compensate for. 

It was a work of art, a product of genius. Still crazy most definitely, but undeniably sheer genius. 

“Looks good, Jamie,” she finally concluded, trying not to let on just how much in awe of him she was. Even with an extra seventy years of experience, Bucky still found ways to amaze her. 

“Now,” she continued, distracting from her nearly ninety years of still undimmed hero-worship, “how are you going to get that around the neck of one of the most volatile and paranoid men in the world?”

Bucky stared at her blankly for a long second. “Uh…”

“Eloquent,” Rebecca replied.

*  
TBC…


	2. The Wall's Been Down Awhile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It may have been seventy years, but Bucky hadn’t lost his knack for sniffing out the best places to get the rarest ingredients. It was the everyday stuff that was tripping him up. Thankfully, Rebecca’s there to help.

*  
“Grocery shopping is not how I wanted to spend my Saturday morning, Jamie.” 

“You were just complaining about how you never get out of the apartment. Why’d you agree to come with me if you’re just gonna whine the whole time?” Bucky groused, walking arm in arm with his sister through the bustling pop-up street market. 

Rebecca wrinkled her nose at him. “You didn’t say you were grocery shopping. That was false advertising.” 

Rolling his eyes, Bucky deftly maneuvered them around an ironically dressed hipster couple dillydallying in front of an organic juice stand. 

“We’re not grocery shopping,” he corrected. “We’re ingredient gathering.” 

Snorting derisively, Rebecca eyed another group of millennials taking up space with compulsive selfie taking. “What was wrong with my kitchen? I had perfectly good spell ingredients you could have pilfered.”

“Your kitchen didn’t have Xanthoparmelia, obsidian, or running spring water,” he responded dryly.

“Well, if you didn’t pick the most obscure healing spells to weave you could’ve gotten plenty of ingredients from my pantry.” Rebecca leaned on his metal arm for balance as she stepped over a suspicious looking puddle. 

“You’re the one shoving spell books at me every time I come over. If you didn’t want me to experiment you shouldn’t be enabling me,” Bucky pointed out blandly causing her to pinch his side in retaliation. 

“I try and do something nice and I get it thrown back in my face. See if I let you borrow my books next time you come up with some harebrained Frankenstein spell you want to cook up.” 

“If you stop complaining I’ll buy you one of those sugary caffeinated abominations you love so much but your kids won’t let you have.” Bucky glanced at her slyly as they came to a stop in front of an oddball little herb stall.

Rebecca turned to face her brother and looking up into his smirking blue eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Two sugary caffeinated abominations and I’ll tell you the best place to get good obsidian.” 

With a beleaguered sigh, Bucky lifted his right hand. “Done.” 

Rebecca grinned, grabbed his hand and shook on it. “Pleasure doing business with you. Now let’s get your groceries and get out of here.” 

Well aware he’d just been played, Bucky muttered, “Not groceries,” and turned toward the stall to get his errand over with.

This stall, unlike all the other trendy nonconformist conformist hipster run stalls was manned by an older man with a coke bottle glasses and silver gray hair. His wares were packaged in repurposed jars and wrinkled sandwich baggies, hand labeled in loopy old fashioned cursive. 

The magic emanating from the rickety wooden stall was very promising for Bucky’s hunt for obscure ingredients. 

The stall owner looked to be older than Rebecca by a significant number of years, but his heterochromatic ice blue and hazel eyes were piercing as he looked them up and down. 

The siblings waited patiently for him to finish his examination. If he didn’t like what he saw he wasn’t going to sell to them. That was how the magical community worked. Snobby and insular as any other community out there, witches –and others like them- tended to be picky about who they dealt with. For good reason. They’d faced as much persecution and prejudice as any other group in history. And of course as secrecy was traditional, if no longer strictly vital to survival, certain levels of exclusivity were expected. 

The old man’s eyes swept over Rebecca without pause, but when he moved to Bucky his gaze turned intrigued. Humming in consideration, he adjusted his glasses and squinted. (For show, Bucky was sure. The man seemed sharp as the day he was born.)

“Now that’s not something you see every day,” the stall owner commented boldly.

Still arm in arm, Bucky could feel Rebecca bristle. “You got something to say?” she demanded belligerently, glaring at the man. 

“Becca,” Bucky scolded, gently squeezing her hand in warning.

Not in the least bit affected by Rebecca’s attitude, the man just watched them amused. “I imagine you folks are looking for something in particular,” he began, the previous few minutes seemingly forgotten. 

Bucky’s shoulders untensed and he pulled his list out of his hoodie pocket. Rebecca was still muttering sullenly under her breath from next to him. 

“I need witch’s witch-hazel, garden angelica, pennywort, and Xanthoparmelia, if you have it.”

Eyebrow raised, the old man eyed Bucky again. “Not a lot of call for Xanthoparmelia these days. Most people have gone to modern drugs for that.” He lifted a weathered wooden fruit crate onto the table between them, his expression sly. “You look a little young to be having trouble rising to the occasion.”

Bucky chuckled and returned the smirk. Leaning closer he got a look at the contents of the crate. “I’m older than I look, but it’s not for me.”

“Ah,” the man nodded knowingly still with an edge of mischievousness. “It’s for a friend.”

Bucky ignored Rebecca’s annoyed huff and just grinned at the man, shrugging a shoulder. “More a friend of a friend.” 

“Well, friend or not this is all my stock of Xanthoparmelia.” Standing behind the table, his posture relaxed, the old man gestured to a small brown bottle and watched Bucky pick it up reading the label carefully. “Good thing it’s got a long shelf life, I’ve been sitting on that bottle about ten years or so.” 

The yellowed label was peeling off and the last three letters of the name were smudged, but the bottle was sealed air tight and had a feel of clean ambient magic to its contents. 

“Looks good,” he glanced up at the stall owner. “I’ll take it.” 

The man nodded pleased to have it taken off his hands and shoved the crate back under the table. “The rest of the herbs you want should be set out already. Pick what you want. Tell me if you can’t find anything.”

Bucky and Becca moved along to the other mishmash of boxes, crates, and baskets of plants and herbs lined up on display. They spent another fifteen minutes perusing the selection and in the end Bucky got his witch’s witch-hazel, garden angelica, and pennywort, and Rebecca refilled her supply of lime blossoms and bachelor’s buttons. 

Eyeing her purchases, Bucky shook his head incredulously. “I cannot believe you need to restock already. You enable your friends’ sex lives way too much.”

“What is it my grandkids say? Oh, yeah. Don’t slut-shame, Jamie.” Rebecca grinned unrepentantly in the face of Bucky’s pained expression. 

“Lime blossom and bachelor’s button,” the stall owner was nodding knowingly again as he wrote out a receipt by hand. “Fornication and celibacy. Making-love spells are my best selling ingredients.” 

Bucky just groaned and forked over $127.42 in Hydra begotten bills. 

Transactions made, magical ingredients acquired and stowed away, the siblings stepped back into the flow of trendy foot traffic, arm in arm once again. 

“Where to next, big brother?” Rebecca asked feeling happier now that she’d scandalized him a little. 

“To the actual grocery store,” he replied wryly, lips curving in good natured exasperation in the face of her self-satisfied expression. “I still need pumpkin seeds, almond seeds, cilantro, and spring water.”

“And my sugary caffeinated abominations. You owe me two of them,” she reminded him. 

“I didn’t forget.” He sighed then mumbled, “I was hoping you’d forget.” 

“I heard that,” Rebecca gave him an unimpressed look. “I’m old, not senile. You’re not getting out of our deal that easily.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her only a little sarcastically. 

A ten minute walk later and they were wandering around the nearest grocery store. Rebecca sipping on a 16 ounce can of Monster Energy drink, five more tall black cans still in their plastic six pack rings dangling from her free hand. Bucky following along behind her lamenting the fact that he’d let his little sister wheedle a full six pack out of him instead of the two they’d agreed on. 

They breezed through the nuts and seeds aisle, dropping bags of organic pumpkin and almond seeds in the handbasket hanging from Bucky’s metal hand before moving onto the drink aisle. 

“What’s taking you so long?” Rebecca huffed, already halfway through her can of illicit beverage. “Just grab a bottle that says ‘natural spring water’ on it.”

“There’s like twenty different brands.” Bucky scowled in frustrated indecision. “How’s anybody supposed to pick one?”

“Welcome to the wonders of American capitalism. Where you can buy what you want, when you want, and you have many, many options to choose from.” Thrusting her now mostly empty can at Bucky, Rebecca grabbed a glass bottle boasting “all natural pure mountain spring water” off the shelf and dropped it in the basket. 

Snatching her drink back, she gave her brother a patronizing look. 

“This ain’t the Soviet Union and you weren’t a Commie long enough to go _Moscow on the Hudson_ on me. Now quit scowling and let’s go get your cilantro. It’s almost time for my stories to come on and I want to find out if Monica is having her second cousin’s baby or if it’s just cancer.”

Bucky followed along in his sister’s wake, slightly dazed and wondering if he should mention that he didn’t understand that reference or if he should just ignore it. Coming to a stop in front of a selection of four different kinds of cilantro, Bucky sighed in resignation. The future was confusing and he had enough to worry about. He’ll get around to pop culture later. 

*

TBC…


	3. Just Keep Swimming, Swimming, Swimming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe it was a little weird for a guy to be so concerned about another guy’s swimmers, but luckily for Tony Stark, Bucky had no problem crossing all kinds of bro-code lines.

After lunch (and the revelation that Monica was actually pregnant with twins by her next door neighbor’s husband, Chad, who was also sleeping with her sister) Bucky decided he was going to hang around his sister’s apartment instead of retreating back to his lonely Hydra accommodations. 

Most of the ingredients he needed, Rebecca had offered to let him use and it was easier to weave the magic in her kitchen than carting everything across Brooklyn. 

Becca’s stories were over by then and Bucky let the sound of _Wheel of Fortune_ fill the background as he went about cooking Tony Stark’s virility-renewal potion. He’d never made a version of this potion before so he was following along with the old spell book he’d dug up. 

From the (illegally) obtained medical files he’d found, Bucky learned that a combination of the palladium poisoning from the first iteration of the arc reactor and a hard life of reckless self-indulgence resulted in Stark becoming sterile. Normally there was nothing much modern medicine can do to fix that, but under the right circumstances magic can heal where science can’t. 

Fortunately for Stark (though he wouldn’t know it yet) the damage wasn’t so irreparable that magic couldn’t heal him up pretty well. 

His ingredients lined up on the counter before him, Bucky turned back to study the potion guidelines again. The magic appeared to be a pretty standard, if older, example of its kind. Renewal potions, masculine and feminine, were usually about half a making-love spell and half a healing spell. There were variations on both of those kinds of spells but the general theory behind the renewal is the same; sex and healing. 

Since this particular version of virility-renewal was supposed to be a topical lotion applied to the “afflicted” body parts a bit of creative thinking was required on Bucky’s part. Seeing as he was still an internationally wanted assassin in hiding from all and a sundry there was little to no chance of convincing Tony Stark to rub some homemade mystery cream on his balls. If he wanted to revive Stark’s swimmers he’d have to think outside the box. 

Good thing that was Bucky’s specialty. 

A handful (exact measurements from the text) each of pumpkin and almond seeds, both part of the making-love half of the spell, were tossed into Rebecca’s beaten but well-loved marble mortar. Grinding them into a fine paste with the pestle, he scraped the mix into the dinging up copper pot preheating on the stove top. 

The scent of cooking pumpkin and almond started to waft through the small kitchen as Bucky moved on to the next ingredient. The pollen covered stamens and carpels of a five hand span by five hand span sized patch (also exact textual measurements, it really is an _old_ recipe) of bright yellow fig buttercups. They represent joys to come, which is fitting for a making-love spell. 

The pollen covered flower elements were dropped into the mortar and Bucky grabbed the blossoms from a forearm long lime tree branch. Each little pollen covered white flower (representing fornication, because it’s a _making-love_ spell) goes into the mortar whole. 

After that it’s the healing half of the spell. 

The petals from two fist sized bunches of yellow daffodils (rebirth and new beginnings) shredded by finger. Enough ring fingernail peony petals (prosperity) to fill a thimble. Petals from the unopened buds on a single light pink rose bush (joy of life). As many bicolored sweet iris petals (optimistically, they symbolize good news) as it takes to cover his skin from wrist to fingertips, sliced to separate the colors. 

Bucky only had to cut some orange witch’s witch-hazel strap petals (pure magic as opposed to common witch-hazel), enough to circle both thumbs three times then he was done with the flowers. 

The mortar was pretty full by the then and it took five minutes of grinding and smashing to get the resulting paste smooth enough to match the recipe’s odd requirements. By the time Bucky was satisfied, the finished product should have been an unappetizing shade of green-brown. Instead it was a rich flame orange color and hummed warmly with magic. 

Taking the mortar over to the stove, Bucky spooned the orange mixture into the copper pot. The pumpkin-almond paste had (defying the laws of science) liquefied and turned a pleasant golden brown. He used his wooden spoon to stir in an ale tankard of all natural pure mountain spring water, which had taken some interesting measurement and conversion calculations. 

For a full turn of the long hand (read: one minute) Bucky stirred the potion against the clock (counterclockwise) in a gentle bubbling boil. 

Waiting next the stove was the small brown bottle Bucky had purchased from the old man with mismatched eyes and a sense of humor. 

Setting the spoon aside for a second, he grabbed the bottle and smoothly twisted the top off. Xanthoparmelia (or rock-shield lichen as the spell book vaguely described it) was a fungus, chalky white with just barely a hint of green. It was once pretty prevalent in fertility and other types of sex based spells -a few hundred years ago-. It had been especially sought after for renewal spells since its magical properties counteracted impotence almost exclusively. Now it was mostly forgotten and considered unpopularly obscure.

Obscure but very powerful. And Tony Stark needed as much help as he could get to heal all the damage done to his jam bags.

The lichen in the bottle was already processed into a fine powder so Bucky grabbed a teaspoon (actual teaspoon not a tsp. measuring spoon) out of a drawer and scooped out a single serving. Sprinkling it over the potion, Bucky stirred it in and it turned the deep, burning orange almost white. 

Last ingredient to go into the pot was a plastic baggy of copper dust, enough to be equivalent to a pinky ring. The metal gave the orange-white potion a slightly darker shade of red-orange with a light metallic sheen. Once that was done, Bucky had to let the potion cook for a quarter turn of the sun (six hours). 

Just in time for dinner too. 

The Barnes siblings ordered three large pizzas -“Vegetarian, Becca? Really?” “Don’t judge me, Mister Deluxe Meat Lover’s with extra meat.”- and ate in front of reruns of _Gunsmoke_ and _Bonanza_. 

Benefits of having a brother with a super soldier metabolism, Rebecca only had to zip-lock up two and half slices of leftovers when they were done. Just enough for a perfect midnight snack.

“How exactly are you going to get Stark to use this very complicated, surprisingly powerful renewal spell you cooked up especially for him?” she inquired curiously eyeing the perfectly set potion. A smooth creamy lotion was the finished product. 

“You remember when Johnny Horowitz thought it was good idea to pants Steve during the Sadie Hawkins Dance my junior year?” Bucky asked while he dug around in the bottom cabinets of his sister’s kitchen, seemingly apropos of nothing.

“And we stewed up the boils-most-persistent hex in retaliation,” Rebecca added, intrigued as she watched her brother reappear with a bread loaf pan held in his metal hand. “Yeah, why?”

“Do you remember how I got the hex on him? We couldn’t get him to drink it and he obviously wasn’t going to put anything I gave him on his junk.”

Rebecca brightened as she finally realized what her crazy genius brother was getting at. “You dehydrated it and ground it into powder!”

Bucky grinned devilishly as he scrapped the last dollop of pale copper colored lotion into the loaf pan. “Then I snuck into his room and sprinkled it in every single pair of jockey shorts he owned.”

The sound of Rebecca’s gleeful cackles echoed through the apartment as Bucky slid the pan in the oven preheated to 327 degrees and slammed the door shut setting her avocado green egg timer for 52 minutes. 

The next near hour was spent reminiscing about the various and a sundry ways the Barnes siblings (plus Steve) wreaked havoc on the unsuspecting bullies of Brooklyn.

*  
TBC…


	4. You Couldn't Drag Me Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The bonds of sibling love transcends the most insurmountable of obstacles and weathers the most vicious of storms. Rebecca is more than willing to remind her brother of that as many times as it takes to sink into his thick skull.

Since it was probably better to only sneak back into Avengers Tower once, Bucky decided to cook up Stark’s purifying potion as well and plant it and the virility-renewal spell at the same time. 

Like the renewal spell, Bucky had to get creative with the delivery system for the purifying spell. It had to be ingested. He wouldn’t be able to sneak it in any other way. Tony was going to have to drink it. 

Luckily for him his chosen method of delivery wasn’t one he’d actually had to invent himself. Generally speaking most health potions don’t taste all that great. So when he or Rebecca got sick as children and refused to drink the nasty stuff, Winifred Barnes would change the last step of the spell weaving. Instead of grinding the various required healing stones to a fine dust and adding that directly into the potion, the stones are added to the potion whole and they would soak it up like a sponge.

And, of course, in order to weave the adapted spell Bucky was going to have to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning, cook the potion, and drop the stone in as the sun was just rising above the horizon. 

The windows in Rebecca’s living room faced East, whereas Bucky’s Hydra apartment faced full West. So he was once again camping out on her floral couch trying to catch a couple hours of sleep before his internal alarm was set to go off and he’d have start weaving the magic. 

Those couple of hours were not restful. 

He dreamed of sighting down his rifle scope at a target having dinner with her family. Doing a dead drop into a South American jungle in the middle of the night to slit an honest politician’s throat. Feeling frost and ice as it climbed up his throat just before he finally lost consciousness. His metal first slamming into the side of a car speeding down a deserted mountain road.

The sound of a bone saw close to his ear as he struggled futilely against the restraints pinning him face down a rusty operating table.

Suddenly Bucky was no longer lying on the couch, rigid and unbreathing like a corpse. Searing pain against his chest shocked him awake. 

He came awake with a desperate gasp like coming up from water. His eyes had already been open gazing dead at a thousand yards, but with consciousness the sight before them actually registered.

Rebecca was beneath him. Her mouth was open in a desperate bid for air because his metal hand had her throat in a strangle hold. Her cornflower blue eyes were wide, shocked and panicked as she stared up at him. 

Then he realized it was her hands, glowing white hot, and shoved hard against his chest that were burning straight through his shirt to his skin. 

He was off her so fast it was like he was blasted across the living room. His back hit the couch with enough force it rocked on its legs then slammed back to the floor with a loud bang. 

Both siblings were gasping desperately for breath. Bucky watched his sister roll onto her side coughing and clutching her throat. The smell of burning cotton clogged his nose. His shirt was still smoking, orange embers shaped likes hands slowly died to a blackened charred outline against the light blue fabric. 

_Oh God_ , he thought, his heart pounding painfully against his ribs. _He’d almost strangled his little sister._ It was pure reflex. He hadn’t even known what he was doing. She’d probably sensed his distress through the nurture charms she had set around the apartment and tried to comfort him. His right shoulder tingled faintly and he realized Rebecca had probably touched him there, trying to shake him awake. 

“’M sorry,” he whispered, his voice barely making it past the knot in his chest. “God, I’m so sorry, Becca.”

“No,” she rasped taking her hands away from throat she pushed herself into a sitting position. “Don’t-”

“I almost killed you,” Bucky cut in, dazed, still staring at her in horror. 

“No,” Rebecca rasped again, incongruously calm, “You didn’t.”

“I had my hand wrapped around your throat. I was strangling you,” he exclaimed, loud and shocky in the quiet of the dark. “If you hadn’t burned me I would have snapped your neck without even realizing it!”

“Exactly!” she burst out. “You didn’t snap my neck. I stopped you. I hit you with my magic and burned the shit out of your chest.”

Bucky growled, suddenly furious. With himself? With her? Both. “You shouldn’t have had to do that in the first place!” 

“You think this is the first time this has happened to me?” Rebecca demanded, unaffected by his anger. “You think you have the market cornered on attacking someone in your sleep?”

That brought him up short, surprised. He frowned. “What are you-?”

“Robert,” Rebecca cut him off this time. “Robert almost snapped my arm once. When we were first married. I tried to wake him from a nightmare and he had my arm twisted before I could blink.” 

Taking a deep breath, steadying more by the moment, Rebecca took advantage of Bucky’s stunned silence to continue. 

“He was a soldier too,” she explained. “On Okinawa, during the Battle of Okinawa. He came home just as scarred as every soldier lucky enough to come home at all.”

“Becca…” He didn’t know what to say. Bucky watched his sister as she looked toward a framed photo of her husband in his neat uniform posing proudly in front of the American flag. 

“You’re not the first battle weary man to accidentally hurt his loved ones during a nightmare. And you won’t be the last,” she said, not without compassion but brooking no argument. 

“I learned not to touch Robert when he had a nightmare. I never wanted to see that awful look of horror on his face ever again,” Rebecca looked back at her brother with apologetic, self-recriminating eyes. “I should have remembered that, should have realized you still have plenty of healing to do. I put that awful look on your face and for that I’m sorry.” 

“No,” Bucky murmured, his voice deepened with emotions this time, not fear. “Don’t apologize. It’s my fault. I should have warned you. That I have nightmares, that I’m dangerous. Even when I’m asleep.”

Cautious, Rebecca’s lips curved into a hopeful smile. “How ’bout we’re both idiots and we just leave it at that.” Her smile widened and humor came back to her eyes. “I’ll shout at you to wake up from across the room and you’ll let me make you a nightmare trap.” 

It wasn’t that easy, Bucky knew. He was dangerous and this incident was just a brutal reminder of that. He knew he should leave. Run away from his stubborn, loving sister with shitty self-preservation instincts and protect her from the killer he’d become. 

But Rebecca was still sitting on the floor, her throat beginning to bruise, looking at him with bright eyes, the corners wrinkling with her grin. He could feel her love and forgiveness trickling out to him. She was projecting a whole tangle of sweet, endearing emotions at him unrepentantly employing a trick she’d used on him a million times to get her way. 

He should leave. To keep her safe, to protect her from the danger that followed him. But he was selfish. God forgive him, but he wanted to stay with her so bad. 

“As long as you don’t put any birch in the trap. Pretty sure a vision quest is the last thing I need right now.” Bucky shoved down all his guilt and self-hatred and just basked in the sight of his little sister’s happy smile. 

Getting to her feet with more grace than her age would imply, Rebecca straightened her house robe still grinning at him. “Deal,” she agreed triumphantly and beckoned him with an imperious wave of her hand. “Now, come on in the kitchen. We need to put some salve on those burns. Super healing or not, magic burns are a bitch.”

Bucky heaved himself off the couch and followed. When he came up next to Rebecca she was elbow deep in a pantry searching for her newest batch of burn salve. He reached to the shelf above her head and pulled down a tin of bruise balm. 

Silently he held it out to her, sorrowful apology in his eyes. Rebecca just glanced at him with a kind gaze and took the tin without a word. 

A thirty year old reused mason jar filled with home brewed magical burn salve grasped in one hand and the tin of bruise balm in the other Rebecca ushered her brother toward the kitchen table impatiently. 

“Hurry up, let’s get you slathered up. It’s almost time for you to start your potion if you want to make the sunrise.”

Rebecca had ripped his ruined shirt over his head before he could protest and started smearing the hand shaped burns on his chest in thick, cooling cream. Bucky had to wait until she was satisfied, before she let him gently, so gently, rub a soothing layer of balm on the rapidly purpling bruises around her throat. 

Then she put the matter to rest with utter finality, returning to the comfortable routine of heckling her brother about his choice of spells. 

Bucky threw on another shirt and some jeans, but Rebecca just sat down at her kitchen bar with a hot cup of coffee. She settled in, content to watch her brother weave the magic that would cleanse the lingering palladium poisoning and hard partying toxins from Tony Stark’s body. 

*

TBC


	5. Hugs Not Drugs, Kids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ingredients for Tony Stark’s purification potion are perhaps the most difficult to acquire. It’s a good thing Bucky is completely comfortable committing a couple felonies in the pursuit of his magic.

Because he was brewing his potion on somewhat of a time crunch, Bucky had already prepped the ingredients the evening before. Sliced and cut and plucked, each ingredient was already imbued with magic he would normally invoke while weaving a potion itself.

He set Rebecca’s copper pot on the stove and flicked the burner on. Using all natural pure mountain spring water wasn’t strictly necessary for this spell, Bucky’s ma had always just used purified tap water, but he figured since he still had some of the bottle left he might as well use it. Pouring two quarts of the water into the pot, Bucky adjusted the heat and turned to the neat line of ingredients on the counter. 

First he dropped three dried and crushed light blue borage flowers in the pot. The petals settled to gently float on top as their color leached into the quickly heating water turning it blue. Borage was a strong blood purifier and one of two going into this potion. 

Picking up one of three bowls of the second ingredient, Bucky picked up his wooden spoon and stirred in the minced garden angelica leaflets. In addition to stimulating the nervous system, it also invoked the Magic of Threes. Each angelica stem had three clusters of leaflets and each cluster was made up of three smaller clusters. Three times the power of three would be called on so it gave the potion a healthy boost in strength. 

After stirring in the third bowl of angelica, the next ingredient was seven pennywort flowers, stems and all. Pennywort was tied to ailments of the organs that cleanse the body, like the kidneys and especially the liver. Bucky was invoking its magic to target any beginnings of disease and decay. Something he figured Stark could definitely use. 

The fifth ingredient was specific to the needs of the recipient. Cilantro for all that it was used in food was also the plant with the magical properties to expel heavy metals from the body. Stark would need this to combat the lingering trace amounts of palladium in his body. Bucky had bunched together a fistful of cilantro and minced the wrinkly greed leaflets just as thoroughly as he had the angelica. 

Going into the potion last, before Bucky set the potion to boil for a time, was a cluster of small red clover flowers. Like borage, red clover was a blood purifier, but its red color made it a little bit more. Red to invoke the energy and aggression the spell would need to fight against the pernicious blights in Tony’s body. The little red flowers fluttered from Bucky’s palm and were quickly pulled under and swirled with the other ingredients in the pot.

Bucky stirred the potion making sure it looked like it was supposed to, maroon and thick like a stew, chunky like one too. Wrinkling his nose, Bucky could remember the various healing potions his ma had forced on him. None of them were pleasant and this one, by the texture alone, would have tested his lack of a gag reflex. 

“Good thing you’re not gonna try and feed that to Stark,” Becca commented from her seat at the bar working on her second cup of coffee and third cookie. “Reminds me of the time Pa caught you pants down with Suzie Baker. Ma made you drink an ills-of-love cleansing potion so you wouldn’t catch anything.” 

Rolling his eyes, Bucky tapped his spoon on the side of the pot to knock off any clinging sticky potion and set it aside. “Suzie Baker wasn’t that bad. They totally overreacted.” 

“Suzie Baker was a trollop,” Rebecca stated around a bite of snickerdoodle. “And I’m pretty sure the only boy that didn’t take a ride on that bicycle was Steve and that was probably only ’cause he caught the flue again that summer.”

Huffing in exasperation, Bucky grabbed the beat up tin on the counter and flicked the lid open. “Are you still sore that Billy Thompson asked her to the Fourth of July picnic instead of you?”

“No,” she protested, a haughty tilt to her head. “Billy was an idiot and I had a perfectly wonderful time at the picnic without him.”

Something in her tone made Bucky pause. He looked up from digging the little baggies out of the tin and glance at her warily. “Oh, really?” he asked instantly knowing he was going to regret it. 

His instincts as always were spot on because the next words out of his sister’s mouth were just downright mean. 

“Let’s just say by the time the fireworks started I wasn’t gonna be making anymore maiden’s luck tokens.”

“Gah! Becca! I didn’t want to know that!” 

Her big brother’s agonized yowls made Rebecca’s evil smirk widen. 

“Do I even want to know who? No, don’t!” Bucky shouted in panic when Rebecca actually opened her mouth to answer. “For the love of all that is holy, don’t tell me!”

She snorted inelegantly laughing gleefully while Bucky tried to compartmentalize this latest trauma so he could get back to making magic. 

Taking out the correct package, Bucky up-ended it over the pot. The stuff in the little plastic baggy was a gritty looking sticky, black substance. It smelled faintly of vinegar and, after jiggling the bag a little to dislodge it, plopped into the potion with an ominous grumble. 

“What is that?” Rebecca inquired a disgusted grimace on her face. The potion was now roiling angrily with wetly popping bubbles. 

“Black tar heroin,” Bucky answered casually, watching the potion intently, stirring it roughly until it finally calmed back down into a rolling boil. 

“Why are you putting that in the potion?!” Rebecca demanded, alarmed.

“The recipe calls for a sample of the ‘pestilence’,” he explained simply, “It’ll work almost like a vaccine. The magic gets a taste of the impurity so it can recognize what it’s fighting. Without it the spell will just be slightly more specific variation of a traditional cleansing spell.”

Bucky picked up a second baggy the same size as the first filled with white powder. The powder sprinkled like snow down into the potion causing it to hiss and sizzle, a sweet smell almost like flowers rising from the pot.

“Let me, guess,” Rebecca said deadpan. “Pure cocaine, right?”

Bucky glanced at his sister with a wry twist on his lips. “What gave it away?”

Becca just scoffed shaking her head incredulously. “If Stark really was that wild in his youth, I’m surprised he’s still alive much less capable of building such an advanced machine like his metal suit.”

Bucky hummed thinking of the things he’d seen in his scrying mirror. There had been some close calls. Too many for such an inherently good soul. Tony had had so many issues, so many troubles as a young man. It actually was kind of a miracle that he’d lived to his forties. Not that he wasn’t still troubled, if only in different ways. The difference was that now he had a support system. A team, friends, people that care about him a whole hell of a lot. 

“Wait, what’s that?” Becca stretched to get a look at the sandwich bag Bucky was about to dump in the pot. “Is that- is that what I think it is?”

“Cannabis sativa?” he asked unconcerned. “Then yes, it is what you think it is.” He grinned at her look of horror as he dumped the green buds in the potion. 

“No!” Becca moaned. “You didn’t have to use all of it.”

Bucky snorted and stirred it in as potent smelling steam rose from the potion. “Don’t act like the back corner of the garden is covered in plain-sight charms for no reason.”

Sheepish, Becca dropped back down in her seat. “You noticed that?”

He raised an unimpressed eyebrow at her. 

Rebecca sniffed defensively. “I’m a grown woman. I can enjoy a reefer cigarette now and then if I want to.” 

Bucky looked amused, but he grabbed the next ingredient instead of needling her some more. He couldn’t really lecture her about the _diversity_ of her garden. Between Steve generously sharing his asthma cigarettes and lighting up the Howlies for some stress relief, he didn’t really have a leg to stand on.

Ignoring the indignant sound his sister made when he cracked the seal on her saved-for-a-special-occasion top shelf scotch. He tipped the fancy bottle of richly colored liquor over the pot and counted to three before he righted the bottle, twisting the cap back on.

Rebecca sighed in resignation figuring it wasn’t worth complaining at that point. Instead she asked, “Where did you even get the drugs from?” 

Bucky unfolded a little manila envelope, the last “pestilence”, and poured silvery white palladium shavings into the potion. The metal turned it a sickly metallic rust color as he used his wooden spoon to give it the last few stirs. 

“I may or may not have cornered a drug dealer, put the fear of me into him, and stole his weapons, cash, and product.” 

Rebecca just laughed, shaking her head indulgently, “Of course you did.”

Chuckling as well, Bucky shot his sister a mischievous smirk and went about adding the final three ingredients to the complete the spell. The white-purple petals of an anemone flower ( _sickness of the forsaken_ ), a yellow carnation flower ( _disdaining, rejecting the illness_ ), three white pollen stigmas from black tulips ( _power and strength to fight the malignance_ ).

Grey dawn was beginning to lighten the sky outside the windows. Bucky pulled his spoon from the rolling potion and turned off the burner. It was a deep, almost black burgundy with a metallic sheen and it radiated pure clean magic. It was perfect. 

Rebecca followed him to the big picture window in her living room and watched him set the still warm copper pot on the sill. Bucky weighed the fist-sized hunk of shiny black obsidian in his hand and waited ’til the sun was just barely peeking above the horizon. Gently he dropped the stone in the middle of the potion and watched as the light of the sunrise made the obsidian soak up every last drop of thick, dark cleansing spell. 

Sun now fully risen over the horizon, Bucky picked the black stone up with his metal fingers. It was feather light and felt soothingly cool. 

“Are you sure your plan’s going to work?” Rebecca inquired dubiously as she examined the stone Bucky obligingly held out to her. 

“It’s what Ma did for us,” he answered taking the obsidian back, rolling it around in his flesh palm feeling its jagged ridges and sharp edges. 

“You’re still leaving quite a bit up to chance,” Becca reminded him. 

Shrugging, Bucky thought back his scrying and the ever so minor danger he’d seen of poisoning by well-meaning, smoothie making robots. “Fairly sure.”

“Well,” she sipped at her coffee and waved a permissive hand back toward the kitchen. “You know where the junk drawer is. You can find the superglue in there.” 

“Thanks.” Bucky walked over as directed and yanked the stiff catch-all drawer open. 

“Don’t get caught!” his sister yelled over her shoulder as she headed to her room to finally dress for the day. 

“I’ll try not to,” Bucky called back wryly, snatching a bent up, half squeezed tube of glue. 

Looking at the rubbed out “kra- gl-e” on the wrinkled tube, Bucky hoped his plan really did work. He wasn’t looking forward to making the potion all over again if it failed. It really was a pain in the ass to find a drug dealer selling the good stuff in this neighborhood. 

*

TBC…


	6. Epilogue: Big and Green and It's Not the Hulk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky always thought it was satisfying to finish a job well done. Even if someone else was reaping the fruits of his labor.

There was heavier security on Stark’s lab than there was on his resident floor, so Bucky figured he’d start with easiest first, the virility-renewal potion.

He’d baked the potion until all the moisture in the lotion was completely evaporated leaving behind a dried medium sized lightly copper colored brick. All he’d had to do after that was grind it into a fine powder and pour it into a dented tin salt shaker. 

Climbing up the Tower’s private elevator shaft was easier the second time. Bucky had the sensor patterns down now and was up to the penthouse in nearly half the time. Unfortunately he was going to have to leave the cover of the ventilation shafts and move through Tony’s large modern penthouse. 

Sticking to the shadows and camera blind spots, because doing everything he could to make stealth charms’ jobs easier was a good idea, Bucky cautiously stepped into Tony’s bedroom. 

The room was just as contemporary as the rest of the penthouse and surprisingly neat considering Stark gave off the impression of not being particularly concerned with organization in his normal day to day life. 

Opening drawers in the walk-in closet’s built-in shelves, Bucky pulled out over a dozen pairs of silk underwear; boxers, briefs, and boxer-briefs. He went through them shaking powdered virility-renewal lotion on the crotch of every single pair. Placing them back exactly how he found them, stacked, folded, and organized by color, Bucky ghosted out of the penthouse and back up into the elevator shaft. 

Stark’s workshop, unlike his bedroom, was chaos. Amazing, futuristic chaos. It was everything Bucky always imagined the future would be. There were even robots rolling around the place beeping to each other. 

He was frozen, hanging upside down out of a ventilation duct just staring in awe. Holograms were floating idly in the air, state of the art tools were littering all the surfaces, scuffed and battered parts of the Iron Man suit were scattered around on the worktables. Bucky would have been content to examine each and every inch of the place for hours, but with a shake of his head he got back on task. 

Gracefully lowering himself from the vent, Bucky landed on his feet on the concrete floor with no sound. The robots moving seemingly aimless around the shop suddenly stopped and turned toward him. He sucked in a breath and held perfectly still. 

His notice-me-not and plain-sight charms were in working order and he could feel his stealth enchantment radiating from his skin across his eyes and temples. He knew the bots couldn’t _see_ him, but it hadn’t occurred to him that they would be able to register a presence, a disturbance in the area. 

The curious, squealing bot wearing a dunce hat trundled toward him. Its claw was opening and closing as the camera inside scanned the air around him; up and down, back and forth. Heart pounding, body unmoving as stone, Bucky watched the bot and wondered what its pips, hums, and whistles were communicating to the other two bots. 

Finally after several long slightly nerve wracking moments, the bot seemed satisfied that there wasn’t anything interesting about that patch of space and turned around rolling back to the other bots. The three of them beeped and whistled at each other some more as they went back to ineffectually sweeping up a spilled pile of nuts and bolts. 

Cautiously taking his first step toward the small wet bar-kitchenette, Bucky watched them for a sign that they would come investigate again. Luckily they stayed occupied with tidying up. 

It seemed Stark had thought to do the dishes at some point, or maybe one of the bots did, ’cause the smoothie cups Bucky was looking for were all stacked in the dishwasher. There were six in all, brushed silver and gold and hotrod red insulated cups. He pulled all of them out and set them on the small counter. 

Reaching into his trusty backpack, Bucky pulled out an old chewing tobacco tin and the half empty tube of superglue. He took one of the red cups and squeezed a penny sized glob of glue in the bottom. In the tobacco tin there were ten shards of shiny black obsidian, as long as a matchstick and around a half inch wide. Grabbing one, he carefully dropped it in the cup and pressed it down in the glue for a few seconds until the glue set. 

Satisfied that it was good and stuck, Bucky put it back in the dishwasher and grabbed the next cup. When all six smoothie cups were finished, there were still four shards left so he grabbed some coffee mugs and glued the rest of the obsidian in those too. 

Bucky wasn’t worried about Stark discovering the bits of rock krazy glued inside the cups because he’d muttered an inanimate object notice-me-not enchantment over the shards before packing them in the tin. Replacing the last cup back where he found it, his task was done and it was time he got the hell out of the Tower before his presence really was discovered. 

Taking one last wistful look around a futurist’s haven, Bucky lifted himself silently up into the vents and started the tedious trek back down the Tower and then out of Manhattan all together. 

*

Tony couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He was sleeping deep and long, a full eight hours most nights (or days). His limbs felt lighter somehow, his joints moved smoother, and the darkly stained veins around his reactor had almost completely disappeared. 

He hadn’t noticed it ’til it was gone, but an odd kind of tension inside him (almost like it was coming from his actual internal organs) had dissipated. And his lungs, over the course of two and a half weeks he realized his lungs had steadily lost that barely there crackle that had settled in before he even came back from Afghanistan.

All of this he could have ignored indefinitely with a liberal application of engineering binges and willful obliviousness. What he couldn’t ignore were his balls. Because they tingled. 

They didn’t burn, not like that one time his doc put him on heavy duty antibiotics and his no-glove-no-love policy became nonnegotiable. No, it was a gentle almost unnoticeable tickle inside his scrotum. If he was being completely honest it actually felt kinda nice. 

So nice in fact that he hasn’t jerked it this much since college. He’d gone from spending the average (or less than, but he refused to acknowledge that yet) amount of time with himself for a man his age, to running through two and a half bottles of lube in two weeks. 

He probably would have been able to ignore that too. If he hadn’t looked down one day to see that his whole groin area was suddenly a light shade of green.

“JARVIS!” Tony stared wild eyed at his abnormally colored junk trying not to panic. “Call my doctor! I need an appointment ASAP!” He shifted around his bits and bobs to get a better look. With a strangled kind of sound in the back of his throat he shouted, “Today! Tell him I need one today!”

Within the hour (and a very large emergency appointment surcharge) Tony was being slightly violated by a q-tip, doing the turn-your-head-and-cough, and experiencing for the first time that thing with the glove and, “Hello! At least buy me dinner first.” He was also drained of approximately a pint of blood and instructed to pee (and other things) in a cup. 

At Tony’s insistent urging (and another sizable add-on to the bill) the doc put a rush on the results. 

“Well, Mr. Stark,” the doctor said examining Tony’s results calmly, “there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you.”

“What do you mean nothing’s wrong with me? My family jewels are green.” Tony gestured downward pointedly as if the doctor hadn’t just gotten pretty hands-on with his privates not twenty minutes ago. “How is that not a cause for concern?” 

“Ah, yes, about that.” Finally looking up from the file in his hands, the doctor had a slightly puzzled expression on his face. “It seems your sperm count has risen to normal levels, better than normal actually.” 

His frenetic movement brought to a screeching halt, Tony stared at the doctor. “But I’m sterile,” he protested blankly. “The palladium poisoning rendered me sterile.” 

“There isn’t any palladium in your system, Mr. Stark,” the doctor told him looking even more bewildered. “The trace amounts that lingered in your system are completely gone. And by what I can tell from your blood work, the drug and alcohol damage to your kidneys and liver has healed almost completely as well.”

Jaw dropping open and closed in shock, Tony demanded, “What about the green? There’s no way that’s natural.”

“No, it isn’t,” the doctor conceded. “While the palladium is gone you do have slightly elevated levels of copper in your system. Nothing harmful though,” he rushed to reassure when Tony looked like he was ramping up again. 

“That’s most likely why your skin is green,” the doctor went on. “When exposed to the acidity from our bodies copper takes on a green tint. If I had to guess you must have come in contact with a fairly sizable amount of copper and it reacted to this spontaneous purge of toxins from your body.” 

“‘Spontaneous purge of toxins’,” Tony repeated dubiously. “That’s what you’re going with? My genitals somehow got dipped in some copper and it turned them green because my body just suddenly decided to spit out every toxic thing I’ve put in it over the last forty-five years.”

“The green should go away after a few hot showers,” the doctor offered awkwardly, attempting to placate him. “But, well, yes.” Deciding to just throw himself completely behind this explanation, he nodded more confidently. “You haven’t been this healthy since you were in your twenties.” Then shrugging he added, “I’ve never seen anything like this before, Mr. Stark. Frankly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say it was just like magic.” 

“Magic,” Tony repeated again, unimpressed. Maybe he needed to get another doctor because obviously this one didn’t actually know any better if the best he could come up with was “magic”.

Back at the Tower, Tony stepped out of the elevator in a daze. He was still circling the mystery of his many and varied (and obviously useless) test results around in his head. Nothing about this made any sense. The human body didn’t just heal from permanent damage all on its own. There was no cure for toxic sterilization or alcohol damage to the liver. 

_This is exactly why I don’t do the squishy sciences_ , he thought sullenly.

“Tony!” Looking up he saw Cap sitting at the kitchen bar drinking out of his personal orange juice jug (because he drank enough to have his own). “JARVIS said you had a medical emergency. Is everything okay?”

“Huh? What? Oh, yeah,” Tony responded absently, still distracted with his spinning thoughts. “Apparently I’m the picture of health.”

“Oh. That’s good.” Hesitating when he saw the odd expression on Tony’s face, Steve added, “What’s the problem, then?”

“The problem,” Tony frowned grabbing a mug and pouring himself some coffee, “is that I haven’t been this healthy since I was twenty and the doctor has no idea why.”

Seeing Steve’s expression of confusion and earnest concern, Tony rolled his eyes as he sat down across from him. He took comfort in the caffeine boost as he explained the utterly illogical situation. 

“Apparently there isn’t single trace of palladium left in my system, my kidneys and liver are pretty much like new, and my swimmers are ready to go for gold.” Tony looked way too exasperated for having received such good news. 

“I don’t understand,” Steve admitted, bewildered by Tony’s attitude. “What exactly is the problem?”

“The problem is that stuff like this doesn’t just happen,” Tony flailed his arms in exclamation. “Super soldier transformations notwithstanding, it’s just not scientifically possible. Even after a whole battery of apparently useless tests the doc couldn’t even come up with a good explanation for it all.”

Frowning thoughtfully, Steve asked, “What did the doctor actually say?”

Scoffing in derision, “I probably need a new doctor ’cause the best he could come up with was that it happened just like magic,” Tony replied. 

Then yelped as Steve sprayed him right in the face with a mouthful of orange juice.

*  
END.


End file.
